Book contents
- Land and Liberalism
- Land and Liberalism
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 ‘Our American Aristotle’
- 2 Agrarianism and Political Thought
- 3 The Land War and the Land League
- 4 The Catholic Church and the Land Question
- 5 Transatlantic Radicalism and the Land Question
- 6 Class, Culture, and Place
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - Transatlantic Radicalism and the Land Question
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 March 2023
- Land and Liberalism
- Land and Liberalism
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 ‘Our American Aristotle’
- 2 Agrarianism and Political Thought
- 3 The Land War and the Land League
- 4 The Catholic Church and the Land Question
- 5 Transatlantic Radicalism and the Land Question
- 6 Class, Culture, and Place
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
This chapter tracks the impact of George and the Land War on some of the central ideological currents of the period, revealing how the transatlantic Land War came to occupy its fractious place in liberal political thinking. It suggests the importance of George’s radical campaigns and the Irish land agitation in accelerating acceptance of the more technocratic sightlines of new liberalism and economic marginalism. Pressed by the destabilising threat of demands for access to land grounded in natural rights, liberal political thinkers discarded the last vestiges of the tradition’s democratic-republican heritage in favour of a statist and ostensibly ‘value-free’ perspective enunciated in a language of scientific authority. Henry George’s social and intellectual networks are examined, as well as the work of liberal political theorists dealing with the land question, George, and the Irish crisis. The chapter argues that the contradictions between liberty and property – between natural freedoms and private accumulation – that the Land War exposed forced liberalism to finally and more fully dispose of its older individualistic assumptions in order to protect social order, property, ‘progress’, and ‘civilization’.
Keywords
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- Information
- Land and LiberalismHenry George and the Irish Land War, pp. 153 - 187Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023